Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

“Over the last several decades,…medicine has waged a major war against cancer, concentrating on earlier diagnosis and improved therapy. The war is not being won. Nevertheless, medicine shows few signs of admitting that its strategy may be flawed. In this it resembles a World War I general who stated: ‘Casualties: huge. Ground gained: negligible. Conclusion: press on.’”

If you look at the contribution of cancer-killing chemo to five-year survival in cancer patients, it’s on the order of only about 2%. Now, there’s some pediatric cancers we’ve gotten good at treating, and testicular cancer and Hodgkin’s disease are exceptions, but if you look at our most common cancers—colon, lung, breast, and prostate—the success rate is only about 1%. Meaning like, out of nearly 14,000 colon cancer patients, only 146 lived out five years thanks to chemotherapy. So, the chance of survival benefit is like one in a hundred, but doctors don’t tell patients that. “…[N]ew chemotherapy drug[s are] promoted as…major breakthrough[s], only to be later [quietly] rejected.” “The minimal impact on survival in the more common cancers conflicts with the perceptions of many patients who feel they are receiving a treatment that will significantly enhance their chances of cure.”

“In view of the minimal impact of cytotoxic chemotherapy on 5-year survival, and the lack of any major progress over the last 20 years, it follows that [its] main role…is really in palliation.” It can shrink tumors down, relieving pain and pressure—but that doesn’t tend to translate into living any longer. “The failure of therapy, coupled with the realization that the overwhelming majority of cancer is related to environmental, particularly lifestyle, factors, dictates that prevention should be our foremost aim.”

“Cancer is [largely] a preventable disease,” but it does “require…major lifestyle changes.” Of the millions diagnosed with cancer every year, as many as 90 to 95% of cancers are caused by “lifestyle factors,” and only 5% to 10% caused by bad genes. We know this because of “enormous differences in the incidence of [different] forms of cancer” around the world, which then change when people move from one place to another. So, for example, breast cancer rates differ by an order of magnitude, with the lowest rates in parts of Africa and Asia, until they move and start eating and living like Americans, Argentinians, Europeans, or Australians.

So: “There is a need for a major reappraisal of how the problem of cancer is approached.” The key to winning the war on cancer is “prevention,” which not only works better, but “has the great advantage that it entails nothing worse than nicotine [or jelly bean] withdrawal symptoms. On the other hand, cancer treatment, even when successful, often exposes the patient to much suffering, both physical and psychological. Indeed, some cancer treatments are considered worse than the disease.”

Most importantly, though, a healthy lifestyle can nip it in the bud, whereas early diagnosis and treatment by definition doesn’t change the cancer rate; doesn’t change the number of people getting cancer in the first place. In terms of cancer prevention and treatment with nutrition, the consumption of animal-based food components has been historically “associated with increased cancer risk while [certain plant-based food components have been] associated with decreasing risk.”

So, it’s not enough to just avoid the bad stuff. Eating is pretty much “a zero-sum game.” Everything we put in our mouth is a lost opportunity to put something even healthier in our mouths. So, it’s not just about avoiding foods with cancer-promoting properties; we need to eat foods with active cancer-suppressing mechanisms. By “wholistic” nutrition, we’re talking about whole foods. Yes, these are some of the purported active ingredients of healthy things like turmeric, or green tea, or broccoli, but this is how we should get them—not from pills.

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

“Over the last several decades,…medicine has waged a major war against cancer, concentrating on earlier diagnosis and improved therapy. The war is not being won. Nevertheless, medicine shows few signs of admitting that its strategy may be flawed. In this it resembles a World War I general who stated: ‘Casualties: huge. Ground gained: negligible. Conclusion: press on.’”

If you look at the contribution of cancer-killing chemo to five-year survival in cancer patients, it’s on the order of only about 2%. Now, there’s some pediatric cancers we’ve gotten good at treating, and testicular cancer and Hodgkin’s disease are exceptions, but if you look at our most common cancers—colon, lung, breast, and prostate—the success rate is only about 1%. Meaning like, out of nearly 14,000 colon cancer patients, only 146 lived out five years thanks to chemotherapy. So, the chance of survival benefit is like one in a hundred, but doctors don’t tell patients that. “…[N]ew chemotherapy drug[s are] promoted as…major breakthrough[s], only to be later [quietly] rejected.” “The minimal impact on survival in the more common cancers conflicts with the perceptions of many patients who feel they are receiving a treatment that will significantly enhance their chances of cure.”

“In view of the minimal impact of cytotoxic chemotherapy on 5-year survival, and the lack of any major progress over the last 20 years, it follows that [its] main role…is really in palliation.” It can shrink tumors down, relieving pain and pressure—but that doesn’t tend to translate into living any longer. “The failure of therapy, coupled with the realization that the overwhelming majority of cancer is related to environmental, particularly lifestyle, factors, dictates that prevention should be our foremost aim.”

“Cancer is [largely] a preventable disease,” but it does “require…major lifestyle changes.” Of the millions diagnosed with cancer every year, as many as 90 to 95% of cancers are caused by “lifestyle factors,” and only 5% to 10% caused by bad genes. We know this because of “enormous differences in the incidence of [different] forms of cancer” around the world, which then change when people move from one place to another. So, for example, breast cancer rates differ by an order of magnitude, with the lowest rates in parts of Africa and Asia, until they move and start eating and living like Americans, Argentinians, Europeans, or Australians.

So: “There is a need for a major reappraisal of how the problem of cancer is approached.” The key to winning the war on cancer is “prevention,” which not only works better, but “has the great advantage that it entails nothing worse than nicotine [or jelly bean] withdrawal symptoms. On the other hand, cancer treatment, even when successful, often exposes the patient to much suffering, both physical and psychological. Indeed, some cancer treatments are considered worse than the disease.”

Most importantly, though, a healthy lifestyle can nip it in the bud, whereas early diagnosis and treatment by definition doesn’t change the cancer rate; doesn’t change the number of people getting cancer in the first place. In terms of cancer prevention and treatment with nutrition, the consumption of animal-based food components has been historically “associated with increased cancer risk while [certain plant-based food components have been] associated with decreasing risk.”

So, it’s not enough to just avoid the bad stuff. Eating is pretty much “a zero-sum game.” Everything we put in our mouth is a lost opportunity to put something even healthier in our mouths. So, it’s not just about avoiding foods with cancer-promoting properties; we need to eat foods with active cancer-suppressing mechanisms. By “wholistic” nutrition, we’re talking about whole foods. Yes, these are some of the purported active ingredients of healthy things like turmeric, or green tea, or broccoli, but this is how we should get them—not from pills.

240 responses to “How to Win the War on Cancer”

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My dog having a basketball sized tumor and not liking mushrooms or berries and only eating a little broccoli has me buying modified citrus pectin and milk thistle and enzyme pills.

During this process, I look at all of it and have no idea whether I am doing the right thing or not, but most of my supplementd have a whole food name rather than a component of the foods.
Most of this time I have used my spice jars, but the studies seduce me to buy things like enzymes and sAMe and milk thistle.

This morning was a scare, though I am not sure whether it was anti-placebo effects combined with slippery floor.

Yesterday, someone whose dog died of this type of Cancer told me that when they bleed out, they lose their back end and the vet has been emphasizing to expect it now.

This morning, my dog couldn’t seem to get up.
He might have been having a bleed and they don’t bleed in a way you can see the blood.
I gave him one of the little red emergency Yunnan Baiyao pills and waited the half hour to see what would happen and he got so quiet in his breathing that I thought he died, but when I went over to check, his head popped up and he got up and went outside and jogged back to the door for breakfast.

One of the problems with feeding cats and dogs raw or cooked meat is that it differs significantly from the diet they would eat in the wild.

Natural carnivores do not, it appears, just eat the meat of prey animals. They may eat smaller animals whole and entire large parts of bigger animals. This will include hide, skin, cartilege and bone that may act as the carnivorous equivalent of fibre.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0396.2011.01252.x

Dogs and cats fed meat diets by well-meaning owners may therefore be consuming unnatutrally large amounts of protein and unnaturally small amounts of fibre (compared to wild carnivores). Note that fibre is a type of carbohydrate. I wonder if this might explain why

It might also help explain why dogs and cats fed more vegetarian diets seem to do surprisingly well compared to pets on more conventional diets. – The higher fibre content of such diets might (ironically) be more ‘natural’ for them. This would suggest that low carb diets are unhealthy for cats and dogs as well.as humans.

Both our cats lived to be over 20 — one, 22 and the other 24. Despite the cow’s milk my husband would feed Angelique and despite our never taking them to the vet. (They were Manhattan apartment cats most of their lives, and I’d swirl them with a lot of healing love vibes.)

Hub wanted to get on her good side. What did he care — I was the one who always had to scoop her stinky diarrhea out of the litter box! Cow’s milk is a no-no for cats. Her calico mom, Boggles, wisely never touched the stuff.

S, various canned cat food consisting of fish, chicken, turkey, etc. As a dry contrast, Meow Mix. We always made sure their water dish was filled. They also liked Tender Vittles (which has since been discontinued.)

I ate fish and chicken back then, and they’d like that once in a while too. One favored chicken, the other fish. They didn’t starve, that’s for sure!

It is the things like mushrooms and blueberries and other things for Cancer killing, which he is picky about.

I fill capsules for that.

I am not putting him back on meat.

I had left him there, because I wasn’t sure which direction to go, but now I am looking at the Guiness World Record oldest dog is a vegan dog and dogs who are vegan get cancer less and do thrive. There are supplements they need, if they go vegan, but the studies say they thrive and once this Cancer is gone, keeping him vegan can keep it from coming back.

He is doing so well that I am not messing with that part of it.

He was supposed to die 6 weeks ago and watching him this morning, he is normal 99.9% of the time. There were 3 times in the past 6 weeks where he looked like he might have internal bleeding, but that amounted to about fifteen minutes in 6 weeks.

Deb that is so interesting about the world’s oldest dog! Had no idea. I’ve learned from my brief research that it’s very possible to put dogs on a plant based diet and give them optimal health. I wish the same were true for cats, unfortunately I’ve learned it can be dangerous to put cats on an all plant based diet but their needs are so much different than dogs, so that does not reflect the needs of dogs at all. For cats, from what I’ve learned, it’s a matter of over-alkalizing them and that can be extremely dangerous to their kidneys – cats require a much more acidic environment unlike us, according to all I’ve read on the subject.

Cytotoxic chemotherapy isn’t the only weapon in conventional cancer treatment and the inference that the chances of surviving 5 years, after eg a diagnosis of breast cancer, are minimal is just plain wrong in many cases eg:

“The 5-year relative survival rate for women with stage 0 or stage I breast cancer is close to 100%.
For women with stage II breast cancer, the 5-year relative survival rate is about 93%.
The 5-year relative survival rate for stage III breast cancers is about 72%. But often, women with these breast cancers can be treated successfully.
Breast cancers that have spread to other parts of the body are more difficult to treat and tend to have a poorer outlook. Metastatic, or stage IV breast cancers, have a 5-year relative survival rate of about 22%. Still, there are often many treatment options available for women with this stage of breast cancer.”https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/understanding-a-breast-cancer-diagnosis/breast-cancer-survival-rates.html

Th problem with downplaying or minimising the effectiveness of conventional treatments is that it encourages people to refuse conventional care and to adopt alternative health approaches or even quack remedies. These have been shown to increase mortality risk compared to conventional care. Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater, based largely on statistical estimates from a single, debatable paper.

Yes, diet and lifestyle are the best defences we have but treatment can significantly improve survival time and quality of life in many cases. This video may give the impression that conventional cancer treatment is ineffective in most cases – whereas it is actually talking about theeffectiveness of chemotherapy alone in a subset of cancers.

Hidden in the outcome statistics of these cancer studies are the effects of lifestyle changes on treatment outcome. Few people given a diagnosis of cancer fail to make some kind of lifestyle change, be it diet, exercise, etc. Show me a cancer study that has incorporated lifestyle changes made after a cancer diagnosis into their outcome results that have controlled for no lifestyle changes vs various lifestyle changes. I know of no such studies (which doesn’t mean there isn’t) but maybe someone out there does. Until we have some large scale (i.e., big N studies) the results of the outcome studies done so far are confounded. Majorly confounded.

I find this line from the transcript “. . . . if you look at our most common cancers—colon, lung, breast, and prostate—the success rate is only about 1%. ” dubious at best.

Considering how heavily the cancer industry can and does influences and spins published research, I’d feel willing to lay heavy odds that this supposed 1% seems a gross overestimate, and that the actual effect on patients with these cancers – from chemotherapy as such – does not actually seem on the positive side at all, but into single or double digits into the negative.

Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, summed up the situation as follows: “There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.” (http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/asset?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.PDF) Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of The Lancet, perhaps the most respected peer-reviewed medical journal in the world, agreed. He wrote: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext?rss%25253Dyes)

We unfortunately now live in a post-truth world. Invalid but compelling misinformation has become increasingly abundant, and trustworthy information has become ever harder to find.

Right now my top two recommendations for anyone diagnosed with cancer consist of the following:

1. Immediately switch to a low methionine diet (basically a vegan diet – with absolutely no dairy, or even better, a low protein vegan diet) that will also decrease IGF1 (a potent cancer promoter http://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-plant-based-to-lower-igf-1/). In animals at least, this kind of diet can stop cancer growth dead in its tracks (see jpegs below and check out http://nutritionfacts.org/video/starving-cancer-with-methionine-restriction/), and the results in humans look extremely promising as well. In my opinion diet should play a essential and primary role in cancer treatment – anything else, whether more benign natural remedies (like vitamins, herbs, mushrooms, etc.) or the usual draconian conventional therapies at best can compliment this, and can not substitute for a diet that inhibits cancer growth.

2. Get a copy of Dr. Kelly Turner’s Radical Remissions book, ( http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Remission-Surviving-Cancer-Against/dp/0062268759/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1433444675&sr=1-1 ), and read it cover to cover, the sooner after diagnosis the better, although anytime seems good. Hope and inspiration can become in very short supply for people diagnosed with cancer once the cancer industry has gotten hold of them, where forcing patient compliance through fear, intimidation, and misinformation seems the rule. This book can provide a much needed infusion of hope and inspiration to those who have desperate need for them, and includes inspirational accounts both from those who chose alternative treatments alone and survived, and those who chose conventional treatments in combination with alternative modalities and survived. Radical healings for those who chose to do conventional therapy alone seem very few and far between.

The claim about chemotherapy being effective in only 1 or 2% of cases is based on a single paper from Australia. It deliberately excluded a numner of cancers for which chemotherapy is extremely effective and implied a lack of effectiveness which is not suported by the overall data.

Professor David Gorski has made a number of pointed comments on this claim over the years. Unfortunately, te weblinks to those comments will not post here but anybody interested in seeing the otherside of this particular coin should Google ‘Gorski 2% gambit’

“the 2% gambit is based on a fallacious cherry picking of data and confusing primary versus adjuvant chemotherapy, and chemotherapy does actually work rather well for many malignancies, but none of this stops the flow of misinformation.”

Let’s also remember survivorship bias. If 10,000 people try a particular alternative health cancer ‘cure’and 5 survive. you can be sure of two things

1. there will be testimonies from the 5 survivors touting the miraculous effectivess of the alternative health ‘cure’, all over ouTube and the blogosphere
.2. nobody will ever mention the fate of the other 995

“Cancer patients who use alternative medicine more than twice as likely to die,” is the stark message from The Independent. Researchers found that people who chose alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatments were much less likely to survive for at least five years.

Conventional treatments included surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy or hormone treatments. The research only applies to people who choose not to have conventional treatments.

Overall, 78% of people having conventional treatment for cancer survived at least five years, compared to only 55% of people having alternative treatment alone. The difference was biggest for breast cancer, where people who chose alternative therapies were more than five times as likely to die within five years as those who chose conventional treatments.

Because this is an observational study, we don’t know if other factors might have affected people’s survival chances, as well as treatment choice. However, treatment choice seems the most likely explanation.

There are reports that some people find complementary treatments of benefit during cancer treatments. For example, some people have said that acupuncture helped them cope better with the side effects of chemotherapy.

I disagree. Your argument appears to be based on speculation rather than a deep knowledge of the evidence … and seems clearly intended to persuade people that all the evidence showing benefits from convential cancer treatments can or should be ignored.

The evidence that I’ve seen indicates that conventional care plus plus diet and lifestle changes is probably the optimum strategy.. For example, Dr Greger has previously noted

“After a cancer diagnosis people tend to clean up their diets. About a third to a half of breast cancer patients, for example, make healthy dietary changes following diagnosis, such as increasing fruit and vegetable consumption and decreasing meat, fat, and sugar intakes. Does it actually help that late in the game? Well, the Women’s Healthy Eating and Living Study was undertaken in a few thousand breast cancer survivors to determine if a plant-based, low-fat, high-fiber diet could influence breast cancer recurrence rates and survival.

Previously they famously reported that simple changes — five or more servings of fruits and veggies a day and just walking 30 minutes a day six days a week — were associated with a significant survival advantage, cutting the risk of death nearly in half. Note: it was fruits and veggies and exercise. In the video, Breast Cancer Survival Vegetable, you can see the proportion of women with breast cancer surviving nine years in the study if they had low fruit and vegetable consumption and low physical activity, compared to those high in one and low in the other, compared to the survival curve of those high in both. And it worked just as well in women with estrogen receptor negative tumors, which normally have twice the mortality — unless women eat those few fruits and veggies and take a few strolls.”https://nutritionfacts.org/2014/07/29/quadrupling-breast-cancer-survival/

While I applaud Dr. Gregor’s emphasis on prevention and diet, framing the effectiveness wholly on five year survival rates ignores the potential for many chemotherapy drugs to lengthen survival rates for less than five years. Yes, healthy diet and lifestyle are essential, and, that is not the entire picture.

My wife had an aggressive non-hodgkins CNS lymphoma that could have killed her in months or even weeks. Chemo helped her survive another year-and-a-half. Was that of no value? Not to us.

It sounds like you’re defending the medical establishment’s use of chemotherapy as the first strike against cancer. Many forms of chemotherapy cause cancer. Until the medical establishment is willing to look at holistic methods and consider lifestyle as part of an overall program, it is very difficult scientifically to defend it. The common practice of oncologists insisting that you have a day or two to decide before chemotherapy starts doesn’t help defend them. Nor does the commission received each time they order it.

I do not see how you can claim that this argument you offer here has anything to do with a scientific viewpoint. It gives every impression of being on prejudice and on deliberately ignoring any and all evidence of chemotherapy effectiveness.

Sure, in private for profit medical systems, some oncologists may get kickbacks for prescribing chemotherapy. However, this doesn’t apply to so-called ‘socialised’ medicine – ie national health insurance schemes – where chemotherapy is still prescribed in appropriate cases

Also, it ignores the profits made by the alternative cancer industry where practitioners routinely sell their unfortunate patients boatloads of supplements, pig enzyme injections, coffee enemas and other expensive unproven treatments.

It could in fact be claimed that it is the alternative cancer industry that often ruthlessly exploits the sick and the dying for personal profit by selling them worthless therapies. Especially given that the evidence shows that people refusing conventional treatment and instead adopting alternative treatments experience significantly higher mortality

Thank you, Tom. If these statistics are indeed as fringe as your findings, Dr. Greger will have lost even more credibility with me. His non-vegan critics very often accuse him of cherry picking and I have been among his strongest defenders. This, however, may be evidence that there could be something to those criticisms after all. And yet, I am left wondering why he felt he needed to go there in the first place. The merits of a plant-based diet in both the prevention and treatment of disease is supoorted by good science—but as you have pointed out, more as a complement to other strategies not as an exclusive strategy. The dissonance I feel right now is definitely disquieting. Maybe it was unwise to think I could depend on a single expert to provide me with the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“Th problem with downplaying or minimising the effectiveness of conventional treatments is that it encourages people to refuse conventional care and to adopt alternative health approaches or even quack remedies. These have been shown to increase mortality risk compared to conventional care. Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater”

But the alternative treatments are typically not that of a WFPBD with the inclusion of foods scientifically shown to protect against cancer, the alternative treatments (at least the ones I’ve always heard about) don’t seem to go by science but ideas and then someone takes it upon themselves to tell their patients that these ideas will work. Some are quite literally insane like the woman in Australia who was going to a quack who burned a hole in her stomach with black salve and said he was pulling her cancer out with his hands via energy or some crap like that… she died.

I didn’t think he was “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” so to speak as this particular video was aimed at letting the public know that the best treatment for cancer is through prevention in the first place which is achieved by changing unhealthy (often not perceived as unhealthy) lifestyles.

What to do when actually diagnosed wasn’t approached in this video which makes sense because the video wasn’t entitled “How To Beat Cancer” or something but rather referenced society’s general “war on cancer” and how to start winning it.

Currently the only prevention spoke of (to my mind) is not smoking. Prevention practically doesn’t exist in the world of modern medicine. It’s like, drink eat and be merry, and then come see us when you’re dying.

Thank you for your informed perspective TG.
I’ve noted that on Dr. Fuhrman’s site, he has testimonials from those who have beaten cancer however Dr. Fuhrman seems to stress that conventional treatment is part of the survival equation.

I agree. As a prostate cancer patient who did choose conventional treatment, this video led me to the slippery slope of second thinking my choices. I didn’t have chemo, but my odds of metasisis free survival are considered much, much greater than the implications Dr. Greger has made here. It’s one thing to promote prevention of cancer, but it is wrong in my opinion to foster such hopelessness in those who already have the diagnosis. For good or bad, we have what we have in the way of conventional cancer treatments. Despite Dr. Greger apparently disagreeing, most every credible source I found says it is a serious mistake to forego the current generally accepted advice for conventional cancer treatment. This is the first time that I have significantly disagreed with Dr. Greger. Sadly, my heretofore unwavering confidence in his credibility has been vastly shaken by this piece. To me, his statements about an abysmal failure rate in cancer treatment seem intentionally misleading. I therefore have to wonder about a hidden agenda.

Scott – I think you are putting words in dr Gs mouth. Nowhere did he recommend foregoing conventional care. He simply pointed out that chemo rarely “cures” cancer (as measured by 5yr survival rates), and therefore by definition is largely palliative. Not at all the same as suggesting to forego chemo where treatment might extend life or reduce pain.

Btw prostate cancer is an outlier in that it has the highest 5-yr survival rate of all cancers. But this is not due to chemo, which is not a primary treatment for prostate cancer. I think dr G was only talking about chemo, not surgery, radiation, hormone therapy, etc

Dr. Greger said, “Now, there’s some pediatric cancers we’ve gotten good at treating, and testicular cancer and Hodgkin’s disease are exceptions, but if you look at our most common cancers—colon, lung, breast, and prostate—the success rate is only about 1%.”

Yes, I’ve removed a bit of context, but this appears to be a complete and separate sentence and thought. You’re right that he technically is referring to chemotherapy, but he sure seems to have made a bold attempt to paint conventional cancer treatment with a broad and most negative brush stroke. He is apparently trying to question conventional treatment by using the most unfavorable statistics about it that he could find. Since this is indeed very specific to chemotherapy, wouldn’t including that in the title have been the proper thing to do?

By the way, you are right that localized prostate cancer is not typically treated with chemo, but metastatic disease very often is. And insofar as you say prostate cancer is an outlier, that argues that it was misleading for Dr. Greger to have included it in the subheading of the video (in the written transcript, anyway).

My disagreement with him is not in the statistics quoted (though they do seem surprisingly grim). It is in the broad implications he makes that traditional cancer treatment is of little merit. The average cancer patient could easily glean from the video that it isn’t worthwhile to consider established medical treatment—that oncologists are just charlatans trying to deceive patients into unjustified treatment. A decision to forego traditional treatment advice is considered by most credible experts to be a mistake. If they are wrong, maybe I need more convincing, but I tend to believe they are correct.

In my opinion, the video should have much more carefully spelled out that the grave statistics are for chemo treatment only and for certain cancers only. Of course, that would have substantially diluted his main point and that’s why it appears to me to be intentionally misleading. I agree that a plant-based diet is a very convincing means to help prevent cancer, but I would urge from Dr. Greger greater consideration of the badly needed hope for those of us who already have cancer. We can unequivocally conclude that controllable lifestyle factors are NOT the exclusive causes of cancer. And even if they were, we can’t go back and change our past lifestyle choices.

I find it sad that so many who don’t have cancer are centered around hope for cancer prevention at the exclusion of those already afflicted. There are a great many people living with cancer and in my opinion, there needs to be every bit as much emphasis on preventing cancer from worsening as there is on preventing cancer to begin with. For s number or reasons, I don’t at all identify with the “war on cancer” paradigm Dr. Greger used.
But if I did, I would see the battle every bit as inclusive of those currently affected as it is to those seeking prevention. I don’t believe Dr. Greger lived up to that in this video.

I don’t think of that as much of an agenda. To offer an analogy, did the trailblazers against the tobacco industry have a “smoke fewer cigarettes” agenda? While nutrition is extremely difficult to objectively study, there is a growing body of valid evidence that supports the health benefits of a plant-based diet. My belief is that those not in tune with at least a predominantly plant-based diet are victim to either the powerful lobbies of the meat, dairy and egg industries or some combination of self-denial and ignorance.

There is no correlation between increases in survival rates & decreases in mortality rates. The point being that the mortality rate is the same. Also, as a BMJ study points out, “there’s no way to disentangle [these biases] from screening survival data.”

Thank you for this response. I really felt let down by Dr. Gregers video about this because you’re right, it feels hopeless and that one should just do alternatives treatments. However, one of his other videos showed the poor results from that. I’m a two year stage 3 survivor and searched for alternatives but ultimately just couldn’t trust my life to it without someone guiding me through so reluctantly completed all conventional treatments. I eat vegan whole food now and exercise everyday, I minimize exposure to toxins by using natural products and purified water. If I knew to do more, I would but now just trying to be positive and treasure each day.

Also, the Director of the Breast Cancer Survivorship Institute published a review in 2015 of medical and lifestyle interventions for breast cancer survivors. He or she concluded

‘Dramatic effects using lifestyle interventions have been demonstrated in patients with chronic conditions, which now include breast cancer. Several large studies have conclusively shown that diet and exercise modifications can significantly improve total health.1–6 One prospective study of 23,000 participants evaluated adherence to 4 recommendations: no tobacco use, 30 minutes of exercise 5 times per week, maintaining a body mass index less than 30 kg/m2, and eating a healthy diet (high consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, and low consumption of meat).5 People who adhered to these 4 recommendations had an overall 78% lower risk for development of a chronic condition during an approximately 8-year timeframe.5 Furthermore, in those adhering to the recommendations, there was a 93% reduced risk of diabetes mellitus, an 81% reduced risk of myocardial infarction, and a 36% reduction in the risk of cancer.5

Ample evidence exists to support the avocation of a diet based on the recommendations noted in Table 1.1–3,7–12 In addition, a whole-food, plant-based diet tends to promote a healthy body mass index, which is associated with, yet again, a lower risk of all common cancers.13’https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4403581/

My last meal of the day will have been knocked off by 6:30 PM or so. Never got in the habit of snacking between meals, and my breakfast the following morning is usually around 8 a.m. Hmmm….so in doing the math…..

But I get up well before the 8 a.m. breakfast. Am sort of obsessive-compulsive about doing my morning yoga exercises, bouncing on my rebounder, and a bit of meditation-with-the-candle-and-crystals-thing before I eat. I think we HAVE to be a little OB, if we want to stay healthy. I’ve never had a weight issue. Yeah, we gotta take care of the ol’ bod day after day; our cells are always listening. “What the mind believes, the body achieves.” :-)

That television network report of that study you linked is almost meaningless. There may be 1000 different “alternative” therapies, and to lump them under one umbrella does not make for much of a reliable study. I’m convinced that there are therapies that are significantly less effective than traditional methods, and some that are have a much higher 5 year survival rate.

Dr. Greger has a video explaining Linus Pauling’s research in the 70s with Vitamin C being effective in the treatment of cancer. Then the Mayo clinic tried to replicate it, with no effective results. But the Mayo Clinic obviously set it up for failure, by using oral rather than injections. So that Mayo study became the definitive study. It is unlawful in many states to prescribe vitamin c injections as a treatment. Federal police with guns have invaded many doctor offices that prescribe alternative treatments. Fighting ignorance is a tough battle, and I’m in no mood to fight ignorance.

As the first video points out, 2.1%, is the effective benefit rate for the traditional toxic treatments. That is probably from the placebo effect. A hundred thousand dollars and all the nasty side affects and you are touting that? It seems almost criminal to me that treatment with such a dismal results is used. I’ll take my chances with tin foil hat guys with the vitamins any day over that poison. Why can’t we get some reliable studies done on mega doses of vitamin C? It’s cheap, safe, and doctors and pharmacists are not going to make their profits like they are accustomed to. A few hundred dollars for a vitamin injection isn’t squat compared to a hundred thousand for chemo. You go with the traditional 2% rate and I will go with the vitamin route, and we will both be happy, if we should ever need cancer treatment.

However, the evidence shows that people foregoing conventional cancer treatment in favour of alternative therapies have a significantly higher mortality rate. People are nevertheless free to choose whatever treatment they prefer.

And it’s a bit more than a few hundred dollars for a vitamin injection. For cancer treatment, multiple IV doses per week for months and possibly years are usually recommended I understand. Alternative health practitioners will probably also recommend ongoing tests and sell various supplements to their patients. These will all add up to quite a bit more than ‘a few hundred dollars’.

Further, it’s naïve to assume that all conventional cancer treatment is driven solely by monetary motives while alternative treatments are not.

Given that people are shown to be more likely to die while on alternative cancer treatments, or no cancer treatments at all, than people on conventional treatments, I have a pretty good idea which is the better value for money.

And that 2% paper quoted in the video had a number of major flaws. Ignoring those though, the paper was specifically about cytotoxic chemotherapy as a curative method for a subset of cancers. It was not about conventional cancer treatment in general – despite the impression that some people appear to have or are trying to give.

You can believe the claims made on dubious websites or in YouTube videos if you wish, but everybody else will be better advised to consult reliable and credible sources of accurate information on medical matters such as the NHS, cancer.gov and major international and national guidelines by professional bodies.

Given the money that is behind the cancer industry, and how they attack anything that threatens their profitability, I am impressed with the boldness of this post. Personally, when I had cancer 6 years ago, along with cardiovascular disease and wildly out of control Ulcerative Colitis, it seemed so hopeless I was scrambling to update my will and gave up on surviving. Then I discovered Dr Greger’s video on treating Crohn’s disease with diet as the most effective treatment discovered to date BY FAR. And so I started transitioning to WFPB diet and at first brought UC into remission. Each step of transition to WFPB saw a parallel reduction in UC meds required. Now 100% WFPB meds are reduced 88% (and counting), the cardiovascular disease has reversed, and everything else I knew about has disappeared.

The cancer was “only” a melanoma, which I didn’t take seriously. 3 surgeries later biopsy came back clean, but the surgeon warned me about relapse being common with this type of cancer. I didn’t know what he was talking about. 5 years later, my dermatologist educated me and informed me it was within a year of being likely terminal according to national statistics for survival rate of distant metastasis. I had no idea. But being fully plant based for nearly 4 years, I do not worry about cancer or any of the other stuff.

A “friend” works for the cancer industry. She knows my story. She REALLY doesn’t like me, and is not bashful about communicating her contempt for me. She recently was diagnosed with breast cancer and went the “standard of care” route and is pretty smug with her short term success. I fear for her long term survival. I’ll take WFPB any day.

Exactly! Let´s not downplay the role of conventional medicine. Due to conventional medicine, so many people with different types of diseases are able to live longer and better. Modifying their lifestyle would surely benefit them greatly.

Alexandra, it works both ways. Doctors who promote conventional therapies should not downplay the role diet & exercise, but many do. Some don’t even want to hear about it from their patients. I have a friend who was given 3-6 months to live. That was back in 2006. He’s still alive & doing well. If you met him, you wouldn’t even know he has cancer. On several occasions he tried telling his oncologist about what he was doing, but the would doctor say, “I don’t need to know about it, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

When I’ve gone to medical doctors for advice on a “disease” and I tried asking them how I got to that point and how to reverse it, I get a deer caught in the headlights look. It is hard to say if they are just plain ignorant or maybe their hands are tied and they have to follow a protocol and prescribe a drug in response to some “abnormal” lab value.

The issue I’m finding out with my cancer literature research is that it is difficult to say with certainty whether a cancer will progress until death, remain benign, or spontaneously regress. This in turn plagues the results of cancer treatment studies. Dr G posted a video earlier about overdiagnosis with mammograms – this really casts doubt about how good these survival curves really are. Is the apparent benefit just because of overdiagnosed people in the treatment pool? I just feel like the more I read up about it, the more confident I would be just adopting a healthy lifestyle now and not bother with the cancer screening later on.

Well. it makes the point that the guidelines for medical professionals explicitly recognise the importance of a healthy lifestyle.

As for ambiguity, what else would it mean except don’t smoke, don’t drink, get regular exercise and follow dietary guidelines? It is not as though there isn’t plenty of guidance on this for physicians from the likes of the World Health Organization and eg the US Government

In truth, the more authoritative people are worse, they fight against things like nutrition.

When I was doing care-taking, the specialists would seriously cry foul if I mentioned a nutritional study – as if the studies were all fake and I laugh, because some of them probably are fake, but they didn’t want to talk that through with me. They wanted me to not do any dietary interventions.

I had a friend with endometriosis so serious that she couldn’t function and I looked on-line and found Green tea and the doctors hate Green tea as an answer, but it ended up working so well that she never had a problem again.

Way before I had ever heard of WFPB, I was having things like that happen over and over again and have spent years being laughed at and mocked for things like that and the authoritative people get so mean and angry that I used to get run over every time, but now I get that they are using methods to try to get me to change and it is about them trying to change my behavior by acting like a police officer making an arrest or like a bully.

I have always been so naive about manipulation through aggression and things like that. I didn’t even understand that was why people were doing it.

So true, Deb. A while back someone in this forum made a about how some doctors think MD stands for medical deity. They can be sooo condescending when they believe that their authority is being questioned. Not sure who said it, but maybe it was Vegetater?

TG, I agree with your comment: “Conventional treatment plus a WFPB diet (AND exercise) may be the best option.”

The problem with chemotherapy is that it really doesn’t help many patients who undergo it — and we don’t know which patients will be helped, so all patients are treated. And chemo has terrible side effects, some not obvious for years.

But the science is improving: For example, recent results from the TAILORx study, which examined the effectiveness of chemotherapy for breast cancer patients in a subcategory (hormone receptor (early stage, HR)-positive, HER2-negative, axillary lymph node­–negative breast cancer, and an intermediate OncotypeDX recurrence score), and reported that treatment with chemotherapy and hormone therapy after surgery is not more beneficial than treatment with hormone therapy alone (except maybe for a sub-category of younger pre-enopausal women). [https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/tailorx-breast-cancer-chemotherapy]

But I would rather skip ALL breast cancer treatment; surgery, radiation, and hormone therapy are no picnic. (I did skip chemo; existing data suggested the outcome reported by the TAILORx study.) And even these treatments come with a litany of side effects, up to and including fatal ones. So if it is at all possible to avoid this, I would do it. I fact, I am doing it. Yet, not a peep from my oncologists about the importance of diet and exercise. I am guessing that they are not alone.

robert, I noticed that later — ’twas not a good example. ;-( Mea culpa. There are plenty of other websites about this, however — including a list of holistic doctors (some of whom believe found a cure for cancer) who have died sudden and mysterious deaths. Quite a few within just a couple of years.

And then we have the questionable charities. We often see the “care to donate?” runs whenever we go to the supermarket. It used to be they’d give no asking price, but lately it’s been “Care to give $2?”

“Yet, not a peep from my oncologists about the importance of diet and exercise. I am guessing that they are not alone.”

Yes, Dr. J., this is what I object to in the medical community. While this video may possibly be slanted towards diet & exercise rather than conventional treatment (I didn’t really see it that way, but others did), your statement is representative of the mindset of many oncologists who are slanted the other way. They don’t even want to hear about diet & exercise. Sometimes they treat people like their crazy for deciding to change their diets. So if this video is a little slanted, so be it. Maybe it will help balance things out in the end.

And Nancy, MOST conventional doctors would not even know what a truly healthy diet consists of, if they were to recommend one. Can’t you just hear them suggesting “More yogurt, white meat, lots of milk…”?

TG, I was not eschewing conventional treatments for breast cancer. I was agreeing with the video that most chemotherapy helps very few of the patients that undergo it. But we don’t know who those patients are, so all are treated. Or were. As I pointed out, the science is improving; based on the TAILORx results, and previous studies, it now appears that up to 70% of women diagnosed with breast cancer could avoid undergoing chemotherapy — because the data shows that they are unlikely to be helped. I fell into that group with intermediate OncotypeDX recurrence scores, which the TALORx study indicated that chemotherapy is unlikely to help. These results were, in fact, suggested by earlier data, which is why I chose to avoid it.

One side effect of chemotherapy is the development of leukemia — and I have a friend treated for breast cancer with chemotherapy now with end stage leukemia. And she was probably over treated (DCIS). Did the chemo cause her cancer? It’s not possible to say for sure, but her data is consistent with causation, and leukemia is only one of several well known and serious adverse effects of chemo.

So, pick your poison. Our current treatments for cancer are slash, burn, and poison. (Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy). All have adverse effects. That’s why I think that prevention is absolutely what we should be researching. If the evidence shows that diet can help prevent cancer, or a recurrence, then I’ going with the evidence and eating a whole foods plant based diet. And I think that oncologists should be informing their patients about this evidence. As should PCPs.

Thanks. I completely agree that prevention is key. However, I seriously question the claim that chemotherapy helps very few of the patients who undergo it.

Much chemotherapy in any case is intended to prevent recurrence of cancers removed by other means (surgery etc), or to provide palliation,rather than being the main curative therapy. Nevertheless, at least one study I have previously cited here showed a mortality reduction of about one third in breast cancer patients compared to no chemotherapy patients. Arguing that this demonstrates that chemotherapy does not help most patients may therefore be technically true but a one third reduction in the risk of death is something that many would regard as eminently worthwhile.

In the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, as in your case, I suspect that the prudent course for most people would be conventional treatment plus,

I agree with TG that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. But certainly if able to, I would want to avoid treatments that could make me sick and damage healthy cells. In some cases both might be the best bet for survival but I would assume that would depend on the stage and type of cancer. Of course anyone on conventional treatments should be on or close to a WFPBD and adopt lifestyle changes.
I can see why you preferred to avoid conventional treatment and sounds like you did it smart. On the other hand, I can’t see why somone would go through conventional treatment and not adopt lifestyle changes as well.

While I agree that chemotherapy Is often much less effective then suggested by the medical establishment, I disagree that a vegan diet is some kind of semi panacea for cancer. Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, before he tragically died several years ago, treated his patients with varying diets based upon their genetics and type of cancer. He used variations of 100 different diets but none of them were strictly vegan. All of them however were what I would call ‘plan based’ Meaning That the bulk of the food eaten Was organically grown Fruits and vegetables and legumes. Eggs, Fish, Chicken and yes beef Were required to be eaten In most all of the diets he recommended. I was cured of incurable advanced metastatic cancer by such a diet along with Pancreatic enzymes and lots of supplements, As were hundreds of others who were treated by him. I likely would not be alive had I followed a strictly vegan diet. I respect Nutrition facts but the dogmatism with which It vilifies any animal foods whatsoever Is really unfortunate and unwarranted. Is there even one reference in the hundreds of videos to a study which says something positive about animal foods? I’ve yet to find one even though there are hundreds in the literature.

“I respect Nutrition facts but the dogmatism with which It vilifies any animal foods whatsoever Is really unfortunate and unwarranted. Is there even one reference in the hundreds of videos to a study which says something positive about animal foods? I’ve yet to find one even though there are hundreds in the literature.

It’s not dogmatism, it’s SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. If you aren’t interested in this information, don’t read or listen to Dr. Greger’s reports.

There is nothing positive about eating animals unless the study was sponsored by an industry with a vested interest.

Do you really respect Nutrition Facts.org? I think not from your comment.

Well I appreciate your sense of humor. You seem to be one of the few recognize how selective and dogmatic nutrition facts really is. Unless your reply was serious, in which case it’s pretty clear that you’ve been utterly brainwashed.

Do you truly truly believe there is not one legitimate study showing animal products having beneficial health results that was not sponsored by the beef or dairy industry?

Well said, Janis. So many people actually WANT cherry-picked studies just to feel good about something they like doing. Then of course you have those who are vested in animal agriculture, and they REALLY want those cherry-picked studies out there.

I agree as well with so many people wanting cherry picked studies. Which is why I continue to be so puzzled that Dr Greger appears to be a master
at cherry picking. For example search this site to see what he says about cheese and heart health. Not one good word or one encouraging study.

Cheese is bad he says!

Yet when I searched for ‘cheese and cardiovascular’ disease on Pubmed the first three matches were studies and analyses which concluded that cheese was either neutral or led to a reduction in cardio risk factors. None of three showed any heart risk from eating cheese. And none at least as far as I could tell were underwritten by the dairy industry. In case you think I’m making this up here they are:

I would appreciate someone, anyone! here explaining why these three studies as well as hundreds of similar studies are treated as if they didn’t exist, while every pro vegan study is treated with fanfare. I ask this question in all sincerity as I enjoy the videos and have learned much from this site, but only if I take his conclusions with a whole lot of salt. And it’s particularly amusing to read comments from people like those I’m responding to who accuse those who don’t reject animal products out of hand to be cherry pickers.

Thanks for posting these cheese studies. Best way to have educated discussions vs just sharing opinions.

I didn’t have time to read the studies in detail (and one is behind a paywall), but a quick read suggests they suffer from versions of the following flaws (or “tricks”…):

1) Replacement effect. The “replacement” food was as bad as the food being tested. Eg those who ate less cheese ate more meat, eggs, other dairy, refined carbs, etc instead. So all you can conclude is that cheese is no worse than other crap “food”

2) Insufficient diet variety. All diets studied were relatively high fat, high protein, high refined carb. So all you can conclude is that if your diet is already within the range of a typical western diet, whether you eat a bit more or less cheese makes no incremental difference.

3) Reverse causality. In observational studies, those eating less cheese may do so because they already have cvd risk factors and their docs told them to eat healthier. So disease causes diet, not the other way around.

There are several other possible design flaws. If you are really interested, plantpositive.com has an excellent set of videos laying out the ways these kind of studies are used to mislead about the link between saturated fat, cholesterol and CVD.

“For dairy lovers, the good news is that various foods including full-fat dairy milk, yogurt, butter, cheeses, and cream were not found to increase heart disease risk (compared to a background diet that typically contains high amounts of refined carbohydrates and sugars). However, it is important to note that these foods were not found to decrease risk either.

What did predict risk of cardiovascular disease was “fat swapping.” When dairy fat was replaced with the same number of calories from vegetable fat or polyunsaturated fat, the risk of cardiovascular disease dropped by 10% and 24%, respectively. Furthermore, replacing the same number of calories from dairy fat with healthful carbohydrates from whole grains was associated with a 28% lower risk of cardiovascular disease.”https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/10/25/dairy-fat-cardiovascular-disease-risk/

So, yes, compared to eating hot dogs, baloney, white bread and bacon, cheese probably is the less unhealthy choice. But I think a reduced 28% risk of CVD with eating whole grains instead is probably preferable to all those other dietary choices (incuding cheese).

If only it weren’t so – I used to enjoy a nice sharp Cheddar paired with some paprika and served on freshly baked wholemeal bread.

Oh the hair shirts we put upon ourselves! Back in the day, I used to scarf down a big bowl of Breyers coffee ice cream for dessert night after night until a cholesterol test put a stop to that. To think I’ll never……EVER….for the rest of my forkin’ life….have it again! (We ourselves our prisons make.)

I appreciate your comments on the studies I presented. No doubt any study could be critiqued, given the difficulty in controlling for all variables in nutrition studies. Nonetheless there are so many studies showing dairy benefits that it’s hard to believe that they’re all defective.

This one for example which was just published a few days ago and was authored by the eminent researcher Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D. commented as follows:

“Consistent with previous findings, our results highlight the need to revisit current dietary guidance on whole fat dairy foods, which are rich sources of nutrients such as calcium and potassium. These are essential for health not only during childhood but throughout life, particularly also in later years when undernourishment and conditions like osteoporosis are more common,” Otto said.

The study found a 42% lower risk of stroke in people with higher daily related fatty acid levels. That certainly adds to my reassurance that my high fat daily delights, in addition to being wonderfully satisfying are not putting me at any increased danger, quite the contrary.

Thank you for this. Probably unlike some here, I respect your choice to include dairy products in your diet. You’re right that there is great difficulty in controlling variables in nutrition studies. Someone more academic than I would need to assess any general consensus on dairy consumption in the overall body of credible science. You’ve helped to underscore that it’s not clearcut, but my guess is that there is much more science that does not support dairy than you care to believe. For one thing, there is a lot of seeming genuine concern about the association between dairy and prostate cancer. You appear to be quite eager to ease your mind that consumption of dairy is justified. This of course is confirmation bias in the making. Unfortunate as it is, one can find studies in nutrition that support just about any belief.

I wish it were otherwise, but it seems that in practicality, we need to adopt something of a malleable, working school of nutritional thought in addition to paying attention to the science. Doing the former can be as evidence based as we care to make it, but incontrovertible conclusions are unfortunately in very short supply. Something about this topic tends to bring out a fiery emotional component (color me guilty) and that probably tends to further obscure the objectivity. Non-scientists should also probably seek out experts that they trust to help them interpret the science. The trust I thought I had for that has very recently been shaken, so I have to work my way through that.

If I said I didn’t yearn for better answers as to the truth about nutrition, I would be lying. Of course it is entirely possible that there are different truths for different individuals. We already know there is for specific subsets of individuals. It is a possibility that my total exclusion of animal product consumption will turn out to be overkill. Based on my positive experience, I kind of doubt it, but my case study is not science. What is very clear to me is that my dietary style is the best approach for the health of our planet overall. I didn’t feel it so much at first, but that has evolved into a powerful motivator. Meantime, I’ll continue to avoid consuming anything as logically unnatural to me as the milk of another mammal. Maybe I’m a bit guilty of confirmation bias myself, but I would assert that my working hypothesis on dairy consumption is on solid ground. Too, I never found dairy to be nearly as satisfying as you do, so declining it is not that big of a deal for me.

Ok I only read your first line, not going through the rest… Herb, you can “agree” till you’re blue in the face, but we both know I was referring to people like you and people like you always try to blatantly twist it around. Any remotely intelligent mind will quickly recognize that this is a science-based site which goes by the best available, collective, and latest scientific evidence.

The “information” you’re bitching and moaning about not being talked about is a result of the evidence not providing the conclusion you so very much wish to be true. No other reason. But go on pissing and moaning about it if it makes you happy.

I briefly read people referring to cheese and I will stick with Dr. Greger and other research I’ve read. Going on my own experience, I was a vegetarian before going vegan and before switching to a WFPBD, I ate a lot of refined food upon first going vegan.
As a vegetarian I rarely are eggs (was always grossed out by them) and didn’t drink a lot of milk (only liked it with certain desserts and in cereal but already switched to plant milk a few months before going vegan). The animal product that was most abundant in my diet was cheese. I LOVED the stuff.
Within my first week of going vegan (eating refined foods much of the time) my perpetual congestion went away, my constant bloating went away, my digestion began to dramatically improve (it was horrible before), and I felt overall so much better. My voice got clearer too as I so often had issues with a strained voice which I imagined was from the constant congestion. So many more benefits but these were the things I saw within the first week to my surprise – I didn’t know about all the health benefits of what I was doing at that time (giving up all animal products).
Cheese made up the majority of what I had omitted from my diet (and I didn’t start eating more whole plant foods yet) and the effects were profound both immediately and in the long term, of course I eventually gave up a refined food diet and started eating tons of whole plant foods.

I highly respect Dr. Gonzalez, but still am wondering what the rationale was for using animal products.

Hooray that you got healed.

I know that the enzymes are powerful.

I just never heard that he forced people to eat animal products until you said it.

I know that people can get healed in spite of animal products.

The doctors like Fuhrman have said that if the amount of animal product is 5% of the caloric intake, the cancer stops growing, but I haven’t heard anything saying that using 5% animal product was superior to WFPB. I have heard lots of testimonies for WFPB and some for mostly WFPB with 5% animal product, but I never heard anyone say having the animal product caused people to get healed better than no animal products.

The doctors who did “Healing Cancer from the Inside Out” said that part of the reason that animal products have to be kept so low is that it is the same enzymes, which digest the animal products, that are needed to digest the cell wall of the Cancer itself.

Congratulating you on your healing. Just questioning one sentence: ” I likely would not be alive had I followed a strictly vegan diet.”

My statement about being alive because of eating meat is simply because the diet that Dr. Gonzalez said I had to follow – and the diets followed by the vast majority of his patients – if I wanted to beat the cancer was a diet that required eating modest amounts of meat, dairy, eggs and fish.

I think it’s true as you say about the enzymes that digest the meat also digest the outer wall of the cancer cells. I think that’s why I was told to only eat a modest amount of meat – beef once or twice a week for example. And the enzymes that digest the cancer cells are required to be taken around the clock but at times strictly separate from meals so that they digest cancer cells and not the food in the digestive system.

Many obviously didn’t like hearing the dismal statistics Dr. G gave us today. I wouldn’t take any traditional cancer treatments as they are poisonous and can speed death sometimes, as well as their weak record. 33 years ago my girlfriend was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, shortly after hearing Dr. McDougal talk, and reading his books. After consulting with him , WFPD was continued as the sole therapy. She was pronounced cancer free two years later and still is to this day as far as we know.

I agree with you and commend your courage to express this point of view, even if it is largely divergent from the NutritionFacts community beliefs. I admire the passion that Dr Greger’s supporters have for all things vegan and at the same time I know that there are other honest and reputable studies out there worth paying attention to which enforce the belief that a good diet must consist primarily of wholesome vegetables and legumes AND the occasional farm eggs, dairy from grass fed cows, sheep or goats, clean fish, clean, grass fed, meat. Not all of us can thrive on a vegan only diet. The Maker’s Diet by Jordan Rubin is still one of my favorite diet and lifestyle guides, many years after its publication.
Congratulations on your healing from advanced metastatic cancer.

Tough subject, so many different thoughts. Diagnosed 11 yrs. ago with prostate cancer I went wfpb.
No treatments, drugs, etc., only food and supplements for a year. Am I better, worse, ? Don’t know, but still
around, feel great and at 71 get around real well, thank the Lord.
Now if I can only find a way to shrink the darn thing, :o)–that is a tough task.
Best in health to all, no matter what your style.

My wife died of breast cancer a while ago. She lived about four years after being diagnosed, during which time she had surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy each more than once. During those four years, she lived in hell, not because of the cancer but because of the side effects of the treatments. A few weeks before she died, she told me she wished she had refused treatment and asked just for pain killers so that she would have died quickly.

So I agree with Dr. Greger that when it comes to cancer treatment is worse than disease.

George, I am so sorry for your loss. my mother had cancer 3 times, and she told me that the cancer never bothered her (at least one was very early stage), but that the treatments sure did!

my brother-in-law recently passed away from what we believe to be end stage kidney cancer; he was diagnosed just after completing treatment for lymphoma. Apparently the treatment for kidney cancer is surgery — and he did not want to be on dialysis. So, he was told he could expect to live about 2 years — and he lived for 5, never seeing a doctor, and living a terrible lifestyle (he was very overweight, didn’t excise that I know of, and ate SAD). And yet, he lived a very good life for those 5 years, until just a few months at the end. I think he made the right decision for him. (Especially after I read that the average life expectancy on dialysis is about 3 years — and he was not in good shape.) And I begin to believe that cancer treatment is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Some people have strong opinions based on personal exeriences. Scientific facts are neither here nor there.

That is fiine for them. I do find it objectionable though whem they counsel other people to avoid potentially life saving treatment because they have strong even violent opinions on the matter which are contrary to the scientific evidence.

But you can’t just say cancer. The stage is very important when talking about cancer survival rates and the use of chemotherapy. Chemo isn’t even recommended for early stages. And chemo use in stage IV it is well-known to only use to prolong life, not cure.

No one will convince me that fasting is better than whole plant foods as medicine and for healing, but I’m not trying to say it can’t be healing or effective. I am very much looking forward to Dr. Greger’s upcoming video on fasting (I believe I heard he’ll be making one if I’m not mistaken and I hope I’m not).

Perhaps if he makes a video specific to the best treatments for various cancers, he’ll mention the studies you’re referring to.

I read an article recently where the cancer industry is telling people chemo does not work for the most common form of breast cancer. I think they are catching on, that we are catching on, and feel the need to make a change before they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. You can’t tell me that after 70 + years of doing chemo they are just now figuring this out, and if so everyone in cancer research should be fired or thrown in jail… ideally both.

I could not find the original article but if you search for the following you should get some results: “The TAILORx study revealed 70 percent of women with the most common type of newly diagnosed breast cancer can now safely skip chemotherapy.”

Bottom line they will move to another expensive drug, and phase out chemo.

This video seemed to downplay the effectiveness of supplements… turmeric was especially singled out. I agree lifestyle is the best policy, but for me personally, supplementation is some 80% of that good lifestyle. YMMV… Your Mileage May Vary.

Additional: The video seems to be basing conclusions on past data. There is so much happening in the medical research industry that I am thinking we have already discovered big guns for use in the war on cancer. We just don’t know it yet.

Lonie you should watch the movie linked below, they have been saying the same thing since the 1960’s. “There is so much happening in the medical research industry that I am thinking we have already discovered big guns for use in the war on cancer.”

We didn’t HAVE to really discover anything, nature and our natural design already gave us these “big guns.” All we had to do was learn how amazing it all is and learn what not to do.

I don’t think turmeric was singled out, he highly reccomended it, he was just saying that what they try to do is figure out the magical “it” factor of these incredible foods so to extract and sell it or mimic it in a lab.

Believing YouTue videos by passionate advocates of this or that is probably unwise. And calling them ‘documentaries’ is just plain misleading I would suggest

Also, assuming that if everything we do and eat is perfectly ‘natural’, then we will never get cancer, seems a bit naive. It might well significantly reduce our risk but virtually every creature from dinosaurs to budgerigars has been observed to develop cancer even eating perefctly natural whole plant food diets, and living active outdoor lifestyles.https://www.nature.com/news/2003/031021/full/news031020-2.html

But yes, healthy diets with selected spices and other foods, and regular exercise, will be enormously beneficial but will it offer perfect protection? Ordeliver the perfect curative regime?

Best is different than perfect. It’s true there will never be guarantees to anything. Even Dr. Greger mentions in the video how a smaller percent, but still a percent of cancer is due to genetics. Plants are still highly beneficial though, as diet can turn on and off certain genes.

Curcumin is the thing they market as “the active part” and he has done videos that Turmeric is more powerful and effective than Curcumin pills.

Green tea is the food. The extract started killing dogs in 9 days and killed human beings faster.

I think the confusing part is that I can take the foods, like Turmeric, in powdered form and put it in a capsule and that is still a food, not a supplement, even though it is a food masquerading as a supplement.

I doubt the empty capsules are good for him and I prefer to give him everything as a food, but if I have to hide some in capsules to get the benefit, I would rather do that than give him Curcumin.

Same with mushrooms. I bought regular mushrooms and he ate them for the first week, but didn’t like them and stopped, so I bought powdered mushrooms and put them in the capsules. I also bought a supplement, which says, “real mushrooms” on it, because it is what is used in a study, but they also sell “beta glucan” isolated from the mushrooms and that is a supplement.

I would rather give him the nutritional yeast and mushrooms.

I think that I am thinking right about it that powdered mushrooms and real mushrooms sold in capsules or brewer’s yeast tablets are still in the food category, for people who don’t like the taste of things.

If I am not mentally processing it properly, let me know, but I know that one of the studies, the researchers took the real food, dried it out, ground it up and put it in capsules. That is the model of “supplementation” that I am mostly doing.

That is different from: Green tea extract or Curcumin.

The exception that I am making is that I am giving enzymes and I am giving Dandelion Root Extract. Though I did just give the root of the green plant itself and I bought it ground up and watched a video on making an extract and do not know if that is a good idea or not. I am not always the wisest person, when I am so far over my head. I just didn’t know how to get him to drink the tea. I probably will stop with that now that I am doing PEMF. I am not sure if it will be as dangerous as green tea extract or not.

However, i still have reservations about the claim it contains that,unlike in younger people, higher protein consumption is not harmful in older people and is actually healthful. This appears to be based solely on the Levine et al paper, which was based on an observational study and on weight loss in older mice fed a low protein diets.

Given that weight loss and declining cholesterol in older people,are also associated with higher mortality, we should I think be cautious about this claim. Weight loss and declining cholesterol are symptoms of diseases and injuries common in older people. Such observations do not therefore demonstrate that weight loss and declining cholesterol themselves are harmful. Similarly, loss of appettite, poor dentition and poverty are also common in old age and may explain the apparent association between low protein consumption and poor health in old age. As the Levine et al paper itself comments

” In fact, inflammation and other disorders are known to decrease IGF-1 levels, raising the possibility that the low protein and low IGF-1 group may contain a significant number of both malnourished and frail individuals having or in the process of developing major diseases (Fontana et al., 2012).”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S155041311400062X

The truth is that we should all be treating ourselves with cancer and all other major diseases just through our lifestyle all the time, before we get them! But people are so addicted to an unhealthy lifestyle that despite the science it’s not the answer they want to hear – society would rather hear about a magical jelly fish part than hear how they’re the ones with the power over their health but have to change – so they don’t listen. It’s the whole inconvienent truth vs. a comfortable lie scenario, but in reality the truth and living in it isn’t the real inconvenience (only to multi billion dollar industries).
Then on the other hand you have those who are willing to listen but the truth is buried beneath the sea of misinformation thanks to archaic beliefs, money making scammers *cough… Dr. Mercola… *cough, industry agenda and over enthusiastic internet bloggers.

Where might I find that picture of all the great fruits/veg at 4:25 of the video? I’d love to look at all the time and show others the multitude of great foods out there. Thanks for all the good information.

Thanks for that. The picture in the video, though, has much more fruits and veggies, and it would be fun to look at the names for each numbered item (which I’m assuming are also listed somewhere in the source material for that picture). Any idea where Dr. G and team pulled that from? I’ve got the NF calendar posted the water cooler at my office–the great recipes get hundreds of eyeballs a day, and I’d love to do the same with the picture from this video. Thanks.

I have a big question. My grandma get stomach cancer. She have a really special form of it, seal ring cancer. She also has an occlusive disorder at the end of the stomach. She is noxious all the time and she get a wet probe and an artificial feeding through a port system. She had her first chemotherapy last week. So she couldn’t prevent cancer anymore.

Everyone tells something different whether she can eat or not. She get the surgery in four week, where the Dr. remove the whole stomach and construct a new one from a part of the colon.

I believe she could eat some easy digestive food to get stronger again. She lost 10 kg of weight. Do anyone know something about it.

Hello Tanja- I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother’s health struggles. Now and after surgery, please take advice from your grandmother’s stomach surgeon and any dietician in their office. They’ll have very specific nutrition recommendations for her precise situation. Best of luck to her! Dr Anderson, Health Support Volunteer

Tanja I am SO sorry about your grandma!
What might be useful is to learn about the many cancer fighting foods on this website and then talk to her surgeon and doctors and see which of those foods she can safely consume. Maybe they could add certain things to her eating regimen with her feeding tube if you request it? I don’t know how that works. But I would do the research here and then work with her doctors to see how she can apply it.
I would also advocate that she not be given animal protein because it raises IGF-1 which can spread and proliferate cancer. He also has a video here about how low methionine diets can help with cancer.
I know nothing about her disease but I’ve always heard that fruit is the easiest food for us to digest… maybe she can eat fruit? I’d consult with her doctors of course.

I am not an authority or expert on this subject in any way, just thinking about what I might do based on what you’ve explained and the things I’ve learned from Dr. Greger.

That is a very good point! Don’t they throw out most studies where they don’t account for the placebo effect? If you add in a control where you give someone a sugar pill they would argue it’s unethical. Maybe they fear it would beat out the chemo pill.

TG, I could post a lot about the power of our thoughts, but I don’t think this is the right crowd. Kryon (he can be googled) tells us our “cells are always listening.” They are most eager to cooperate. And, as I posted earlier, “What the mind believes, the body achieves.” We are powerful beings, indeed.

Thanks but that stuff isn’t really my cup of tea. People have been selling books claiming to contain the wisdom of channelled entities for generations. How do you choose between them? Most of them if not all of them must be fake. It’s a bit like religions – they can’t all be true. But they are probably correct when they claim that all other religions are false.

However, my understanding is that we all have cancer or at least some cancerous cells – it’s just that our bodies, in most cases and most of the time, are pretty efficient at eliminating cancer and other damaged cells on a continuing basis.

TG said, “However, my understanding is that we all have cancer or at least some cancerous cells – it’s just that our bodies, in most cases and most of the time, are pretty efficient at eliminating cancer and other damaged cells on a continuing basis.”

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. I think most of us know about this. Perhaps I should have been more precise in my wording. “I KNOW I will not get the “deadly” sort of cancer that needs drastic/invasive treatment of any kind; cancer will not be the cause of my eventual demise.”

I agree with you about organized religions. We’re told to look within….that’s where we find the answers.

So below is the healthy Oslo breakfast, what’s for lunch a healthy burger, fry and glass of milk?

“While there was some variation in the [breakfast] meal, its typical ingredients included: Two slices of wholemeal bread (Kneippbrød) spread with margarine
A slice of cheese, Half a pint of milk, Half an apple and half an orange
Extra ingredients might include slices of raw uncooked vegetable, such as carrots or swedes. Between autumn and spring, a dose of cod liver oil could be included.”

We would really need to look into the details of this study, which is beyond my scope. A quick preview does not look promising.

… reduce intake of saturated fat and cholesterol, and to increase intake of polyunsaturated fat, fish, vegetables and fruit. Weight reduction was recommended for overweight men, as well as reduced consumption of sugar rich foods and drinks, and alcoholic beverages…..

Not really. Observational studies like these are notoriously subject to confounding.

For example, the substitution effect is probably highly relevant here. If people eat fish in place of even more unhealthy foods like processed meats, dairy, refined carbohydrates and red meat, this could explain the apparent lower mortality observed in this study among fish eaters.

Thanks but your link only went to the abstract which doesn’t state that.

However, did the study also control for intake of refined carbohydrates, dairy foods and processed meats? All of these have been associated, I believe, with adverse health effects including CVD, cancer and increased mortality

Another point is that it (the abstract) only compares the effects in the highest and lowest quintiles, implying there is no gradient? That is, are similar effects seen in the intermediate quintiles?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352385916300020
Epidemiological support for the protective effect of fish is illustrated by the concept of the blue zone diets. So-called ‘blue zones’ are areas of the world where populations experience longevity (>100 years of age or more) and reduced morbidity compared to other populations. Notable blue zone areas include the islands of Ikaria and Sardinia in the Mediterranean and Okinawa in Japan, with these areas having a high dietary intake of LCn3 amongst other dietary patterns. Fish is the major source of LCn3 intake in Japan and there are many examples of epidemiological support for a high LCn3 intake from fish, such as the Nurse’s Health Study and the Chicago Western Electric Study which demonstrated an inverse relationship between fish consumption and mortality, particularly from CVD events

But it is all based on observational studies and simply shows that eating more fish and therefore less meat/dairy/egg/refined carbohydrates/processed foods is less unhealthy than those other dietary options.

Certainly, if I was going to reintroduce animal foods into my diet it would be several small servings of oily fish a week as per the latest AHA consensus statement on seafood consumption etc.

However, we just don’t know if eating fish is positively beneficial or it is merely less unhealthy than most of the other common dietary options out there. Ditto for long chain omega 3 fatty acid consumption – is it positively beneficial or just relatively less unhealthy than the most common alternative dietary fatty acids? Certainly trials with fish oil supplements for CVD prevention have proved disappointing and the long chain fatty acids apparently came from algae in the first place. The fish were merely intermediate carriers/vehicles for the oil/fat.

Actual trials have not been done on this but in the large 7th Day Adventist mortality study (observational), male ‘vegans’ had the lowest relative mortality of all cohorts with male ‘pesco-vegetarians’ coming in with the second lowest rate.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4191896/

I certainly think that a whole food plant based diet including several servings of oily fish a week would be a healthy dietary option. However, it is still not clear if fish is positively beneficial for us or is merely the least bad animal food choice.

It seems every day we hear of a new “finding.” From your interesting link, mike:

“Increasing EPA and DHA has little or no effect on all-cause deaths and cardiovascular events (high-quality evidence) and probably makes little or no difference to cardiovascular death, coronary deaths or events, stroke, or heart irregularities (moderate-quality evidence, coronary events are illnesses of the arteries which supply the heart). EPA and DHA slightly reduce serum triglycerides and raise HDL (high-quality evidence).

Eating more ALA (for example, by increasing walnuts or enriched margarine) probably makes little or no difference to all-cause or cardiovascular deaths or coronary events but probably slightly reduce cardiovascular events, coronary mortality and heart irregularities (moderate/low-quality evidence). Effects of ALA on stroke are unclear as the evidence was of very low quality.

There is evidence that taking omega-3 capsules does not reduce heart disease, stroke or death. There is little evidence of effects of eating fish. Although EPA and DHA reduce triglycerides, supplementary omega-3 fats are probably not useful for preventing or treating heart and circulatory diseases. However, increasing plant-based ALA may be slightly protective for some heart and circulatory diseases.”

The cited paper about the contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy is from 2004. 2004! Wasn’t there a more recent paper analysing how chemotherapy contributes to survival? With 5 min I found something from 2015 which addresses *late-stage* cancer only: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706056/ Numbers a good enough to go fro chemo IMHO. Obviously prevention is better, but please: these sorts of campaigns maligning conventional medicine with outdated data are disappointing for this site.

There is a lot of naivety in how things work in this world. The meat, dairy, cheese, fish, egg businesses are billion dollar industries. If they found a study done by a legitimate nutritional organization, it would be all over the news instantly. In fact these businesses would not even need to advertise it, as meat lovers (almost everyone) would be blowing trumpets in the streets and it would be a top story on every network, newspaper, etc.. No, not even the meat industry believes meat is good for your heart or good for cancer. They have been trying to prove this for over a hundred years and always get the same answer – meat is detrimental to health. A person could spend their entire life trying to disprove poorly designed studies or those funded by the industry… it’s an impossible task. Now in regards to some of the older studies, they never used to have to document who funded the study, so it was easier to pawn bogus data off to the general public.

The link you provided shows more maligning for conventional treatments than Dr. Greger has uncovered, or at least as much. Very poor results at the expense of much suffering, monies, and hope. This site provides hope.

I think the timing of this video is fantastic.Good on you Michael Gregor, keep beating that drum loud and clear.
On Dr Mercolas blog however , which came out today, he is once again telling us how bad veganism is and how sick it will make you and how much better his high fat carnivore diet is.
Mercola seems to be an intelligent person and it’s pity that he swung the way he did as he has a very large following which could have disastrous effects on the health of his followers.

Very good point. A few years ago an article by Mercola on coconut oil treating Alzheimers got me to try his high fat low carb diet after decades of following Dr McDougal’s vegan diet. I did a vegetarian version of it, but started eating cheese and eggs and lots of olive and coconut oil. After a couple of years, I became so sick that I almost died. After finding this site I got back to plants only, and haven’t been sick since, that was four years ago. God bless Dr. Greger, and Dr. McDougal, as well as all the doctors that have been spreading the truth on healthy eating. They are swimming upstream on a mighty river of bull sh*t.

This typical high-quality missive is, none-the-less misleading because it does not address the many other Cancer interventions, like surgery. To do that requires a book. But it would offer a practical broad assessment of alternatives that, I suspect, will modestly decrease the emphasis on diet, not because it is not relevant, but because it is retroactive. After all, you can’t do anything about what you’ve eaten for decades. But, in addition to a diet change, there are proactive measures that can be implemented going forward that patients would benefit greatly from becoming aware of and may equal or exceed diet.

I really appreciate this website because I eat a whole food plant. In addition to eating a plant based diet, I exercise daily, have good vital signs and good blood counts, have never smoked, never took hormones, don’t drink alcohol and have no family history, but was diagnosed with breast cancer in February. The Drs say I’m healthy. There are obviously more reasons than diet for a cancer diagnosis. I’m doing very well on chemo as I continue eating a plant based diet. I use The China study cookbook and McDougall cookbook for almost all recipes. Your statistics are not accurate on 5 year survival. They are in the high 80-90% for stages 1 and 2. Today at treatment I met a woman who started with breast cancer at the age of 50. She still has cancer (now in a lung) and is alive 29 years after the first diagnosis. She has had lots of treatments but she looks and feels good at age 79 and is raising her 14 year old grandson. I agree that we should eat healthy foods and try to prevent cancer, but it’s wrong to say that works every time. Medical treatments are not hopeless and diet will not always prevent it or cure it. I think there are many causes for cancer that haven’t yet been identified. Sometimes we learn and grow in our relationships with God and people in remarkable ways during our suffering. Why it happens is a mystery that man can’t control.

I had Cancer symptoms about 2 years ago and went through big lists of things, which could cause it. I wasn’t WFPB or organic foods back then, but I immediately started juicing and eating things like cabbage, long before I saw the foods versus Cancer list.

There are things like technology and dental fillings and root canals and power lines, which I never pondered before those symptoms.

I had it on the same side of my body as a root canal and there were doctors who said that women’s breast cancer is almost always on the same side of the body as her root canals and there were people like Bill Henderson who said that diet improved conditions most of the way, but if there is another factor, the people would often plateau and dental fillings and root canals were two of the things he said people wouldn’t completely get rid of it, until they dealt with those.

I think Dr. Greger is talking about the reality that the Cancer industry pads their results by things like diagnosing something called “Stage 0 Cancer” and by dealing in 5 year increments and using “earlier detection” as if it meant later mortality. Someone can find their cancer sooner and die the same time as someone who found it later and they pad their statistics by saying the survival length of time is longer for the first person, when it is just that they found out about it sooner.

Early detection, makes the 5 year cure rate look even better.

If we move it off of Cancer, because of how sensitive it is as a topic, infants already have the start of heart disease, but if they started diagnosing it then and used that early diagnoses say in the womb and then started saying, “People are living longer than ever with heart disease” it is a dishonest weight and measure at that point to take credit with lengthening people’s lives by adding the earlier diagnoses as if it was the same as cure.

To take credit for curing something, which resolves on its own is an example of being dishonest.

I think Dr. McDougall pointed to a researcher who said that even more advanced cancers dissolve on their own 23% of the time.

It doesn’t solve what causes them, but it is important to know it.

I have known so many people who got healed WFPB or Gerson and I know way too many people who killed themselves, because Cancer was just a death sentence to them and they didn’t think they could handle it getting worse.

The fact that diet can resolve it as often as it does, I get angry at the concept that they don’t combine diet with whatever treatment.

Looking at the Cancer sites I looked at tonight, they still don’t do diets based on what kills cancer and they still don’t tell people to not eat things, which make it worse.

You noted that cancers sometimes resolve on their own. Then you noted that some people attribute their recovery from cancer to Gerson therapy or diet. You don’t see a possible connection there? Isn’t that why we need scientific studies – to see if there really is a genuine relationship rather than somebody just attributing their recovery to eg Gonzalez therapy or Gerson therapy? Or drinking camel urine. Or drinking hydrogen peroxide solution. Or using Hulda Clark’s zapper. Or a Rife Machine.

There is no credible scientific evidence that such ‘therapies’ work. Bgg Pharma definitely wouldn’t be able to get drugs on the market based on the kind of evidence offered in support of these approaches yet people are happy to praise the individuals making money from selling these therapies while loudly condeming Big Pharma for selling drugs that actually have some credible scientific evidence of benefit.

Bet Burkey, I’m sorry about your diagnosis. And you are correct that a wrpb diet will not 100% prevent cancer; the risk never goes to zero. But it may decrease the risk of getting it — sort of like tilting the odds in your favor. (And the decreased risk might not even be that large.) But I don’t think that Dr. Greger or anyone else is suggesting that a wfpb diet will decrease the risks to zero — that’s simply not true. And I don’t think that he is saying that conventional treatments are not useful, because they are — for some patients. But not all, and not even most. And the problem is that we don’t know who will benefit from them, but we do know that many will suffer adverse effects from them.

In my case, breast cancer runs 100% through my family. I was the oldest at diagnosis (63), and I’ve been vegetarian for 47+ years. Did that make any difference? Impossible to say, though I’d like to think so. I now eat a wrpb diet (I gradually gave up dairy and eggs a few years ago); will that make any difference to my outcome? Again, impossible to say, though again, I’d like to think so.

The first paper is from 1991, and the second is from 2004 but appears (if I’m reading it correctly) to be based on data from 1993-1998. I know the *main* point of this video is to encourage people to eat well so as to avoid getting cancer in the first place, and I am totally on board with that. I’m curious, though, whether the 2% figure is still correct. A relative of mine just finished chemo for lung cancer — did that really only improve his 5-year-survival chances (statistically) by 2%?

The documentary “Healing Cancer from the Inside Out” discussed the statistics in relationship to the fact that people are being diagnosed earlier, but dying around the same age, I think is what they said. Meaning that they didn’t survive longer. They lived longer with the knowledge that they had cancer, because of better screening.

I am going to admit that I watch that part of the argument go back and forth and think about the saying about people lying with statistics and it makes it more challenging for a Cancer patient to know what to do or who to trust.

No matter what, the answer becomes so much more complicated than what Dr. Greger can put in a single video.

I remember his video series on Mammograms. It took several videos to explain that they pad the numbers by counting Stage 0 cancers as cancer, and then, the whole mortality thing was even more complicated, and in the end of the complicated statistics, the mortality rate of women finding cancer with mammograms versus those who don’t look for cancer in their breasts was no different.

I just remember that the logic is so complicated that people who don’t watch the whole series won’t understand.

I wish Dr. Gregor would reconsider his thoughts on supplements. It seems he believes that all supplements in pill form are useless. I do agree most supplements are very over rated and probably a complete waste of one’s money, but that said, there are many high quality full spectrum “wholefood source “supplements in PILL form that contain the most powerful components / phytonutrients of the plant. It is a practical strategy that should be considered and not deemed useless.
Thanks
VG

Nice new papers about prevention, but this video is very misleading about the way we treat cancer. Cancers that are solid tumors are treated primarily with surgery. The surgical removal of the tumor is the main treatment. Radiation, chemotherapy, and other procedures that follow are adjuvant treatments intended to reduce the risk of recurrence by killing cancer cells that might still be around. Often radiation has a larger effect than chemo does. Other types of cancer like leukemia can’t be treated surgically and for them chemo IS the only option for curative treatment. The four common cancers listed in the video are colon, breast, lung, and prostate; they are all solid tumors.

Oncologists are not walking around under the belief that chemotherapy cures colon cancer when it actually does nothing. They use chemo to attempt to subtract another 5% from the chance the cancer will recur, working from the best data we have. Plus, they probably try to explain the risks/benefits to patients and patients always choose the chemo because it makes them feel better (as we saw from the mammography series).The whole thing is a statistical exercise, for all four of these cancers. More papers on cancer survival improve the calculations but you can’t just take one of them as evidence that chemo is useless and encourage everyone to refuse chemo. Now, it would be nice if we had as many papers on lifestyle changes as we do on chemo. But in that case, maybe lifestyle would subtract 5% from your risk and chemo 3%. Do both and you have 8%!

There used to be a tool called Adjuvant Online that calculated benefit odds for adjuvant treatments from all the clinical data, but it seems to be down. Here’s one that does breast cancer: http://www.predict.nhs.uk/predict_v2.1/tool

It’s possible we overuse chemo and should educate patients more about lifestyle change. But don’t listen to woo stories about refusing “treatment” and curing cancer with diet! In almost all of those cases, the person had surgery and possibly even radiation and the only thing they refused was chemo. They accepted 95% of the treatment! If they never get cancer again, it’s because they chose 15% risk over 10% risk and then the odds worked in their favor.

Something I’d like resolved is an apparent contradiction between this video in which Dr. Greger says, “Of the millions diagnosed with cancer every year, as many as 90 to 95% of cancers are caused by “lifestyle factors,” and only 5% to 10% caused by bad genes.” Yet if you read the blurb on the website on cancer (which you can get to quickly via the ‘browse by topic section), it says, “If you start from scratch and manage to tick off all four (of the healthy lifestyle changes referenced in the text), you may be able to … reduce your overall cancer risk by more than one-third.” So which is it, 90% or one third?

By the way, I am completely sold on the science of the whole-food plant based diet/ the daily dozen etc., I’m very grateful for the big changes in my lifestyle I’ve made thanks to Dr. G. Just want some clarity on these points. Thanks

Thanks. So unless I have this wrong, the implication is that there are other lifestyle factors, (i.e. things we can do) that can reduce our cancer risk far more substantially than by the one third reduction from those four changes. Just wondering what they might be? Best wishes

Perhaps including more specific foods in the diet shown to work powerfully against cancer. To my mind, a WFPBD may be considered a single lifestyle change but there is so much variety in the plant kingdom with some pretty astounding benefits that the single addition of a certain food e.g garlic could be considered a lifestyle change.

More people (like 5,000,000) need to know the truth about chemotherapy. Of course you won’t hear that from your oncologist where “success” is determined by the number of years you live after starting chemo before you eventually die of the cancer you foolishly believed the chemo would stop.

Regarding the survival rate for breast cancer in Australia. The cancer council of Australia put survival rates at over 90%….

‘In Australia, the overall five year survival rate for breast cancer in females is 90%. If the cancer is limited to the breast, 96% of patients will be alive five years after diagnosis; this figure excludes those who die from other diseases. If the cancer has spread to the regional lymph nodes, five year relative survival drops to 80%.

In 2014, 16,614 women and 140 men were diagnosed with breast cancer in Australia. The risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer by age 85 is 1 in 8 for women and 1 in 721 for men.

In 2015, 2939 women and 28 men died of breast cancer in Australia.’….

In the video it’s mentioned that the survival rate is 1%. The paper where the information is from is dated 2004, or am I reading it wrong? If not, then the paper is 14 years old and not up to date.

I am confused to how there are completely contradicting facts on this matter and would appreciate a response from Nutrition Facts to clear this up. Many thanks

It’s confusing because the video isn’t clear about the OTHER contributors to survival rates of cancer. The first line treatment for breast cancer is surgery to remove the tumor. Other adjuvant treatments are chemo, radiation, and hormonal therapy. Out of the 80% survival rate, say 90% of those people survive thanks to surgery. 5% survive thanks to radiation (they also had surgery, but surgery alone wouldn’t have been enough). 4% more survive thanks to hormonal therapy, and 1% more survive thanks to the chemo. The result is that chemo only contributed to a 1% increase of the survival rate. If everything was the same except for chemo, we would expect ~79% survival rate from breast cancer overall.

The first question is how accurate is this analysis, and other people have criticized this paper from Australia and pointed out some issues:

“It turns out that this is not such an impressive study. Indeed, it appears almost intentionally designed to have left out the very types of cancers for which chemotherapy provides the most benefit, and it uses 5 year survival exclusively, completely neglecting that in some common cancers (such as breast cancer) chemotherapy can prevent late relapses. There were also a lot of inconsistencies and omissions in that leukemias were not included, while leukemia is one type of cancer against which chemotherapy is most efficacious. Indeed, the very technique of lumping all newly diagnosed adult cancers together is guaranteed to obscure benefits of chemotherapy among subgroups by lumping in patients for whom chemotherapy is not even indicated.”

There are many studies of cancer treatments and survival rates, and doctors have been using them for years to figure out what adjuvant treatments will have the most benefit for a specific patient. For example, here is a calculator that calculates survival rates for breast cancer: http://www.predict.nhs.uk/predict_v2.1/tool

The article cited reviews the contribution of chemotherapy to survival, but the video seems to imply the numbers refer to all forms of cancer treatment. Disappointing. I hope it was just an oversight in editing.

“As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849

(Sort of) OT:
Typically I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of information on Wikipedia – not so on the entry for ‘curcumin’.
It’s the most biased Wikipedia page I have run across on anything health/nutrition -related.

It seems like people are missing some of the point of this video. Approaching the “war on cancer” is different than saying “how to treat cancer.”
The fact is that “the war on cancer” has been and continues to be a losing battle. The key to actually changing those statistics is through prevention with lifestyle changes. Incidentally, with this approach, we automatically actively fight against our other biggest killers.

Scott, you seem like you just want to argue and are missing my point. My point was that people are worried this is “undermining” conventional cancer treatment but this video was not talking about the best way to treat cancer once you have it but pointing out that the best approach for us all to take is a proactive one with our diets and lifestyle choices which is able to be both preventative and curative.
I said nothing about “leaving out” those with cancer, I just pointed out that this video wasn’t specific to treating various cancers and suggesting the best way to go about it… once diagnosed, that can be a case specific thing e.g. type of cancer, stage… but lifestyle changes should be a part of any treatment.

And fyi, there has literally been a “war on cancer” put into play decades ago and it has all revolved around finding a cure and not prevention and focused on animal studies and since that “war on cancer” was established, cancer rates have actually increased.

The cure is much more simple and complex. It’s what we put in our bodies and how we live. Our bodies are an intricate system, not a simple machine. The best “cure” is prevention but diet and lifestyle can also be curative.

Could the readers of this blog who have been doing their own research or have personal experience, etc. give some suggestions for people who had been treated for cancer and now are trying to stay healthy. There are plenty of videos on this site, but perhaps people have some other helpful ideas. Low methionine in one’s diet was mentioned, but how much is considered to be low? It turns out even oatmeal has quite a bit. Thank you!

I won’t pretend to fully understand the experimental processes utilized, but the implication seems to be that patients in this category may tend to be reliant on commentary therapies to the point of foregoing additional recommended conventional treatments when cancer progresses.

I’m a bit on the fence about whether dietary changes are truly complementary therapies. It just seems to me that cleaning up dietary habits and exercise habits are things for everyone to do who haven’t done so already. These appear to have great potential to improve both quantity and quality of life across the board. So is doing what we all need to be doing really a complementary therapy?

But again, I think it is critically important to strongly caution patients about foregoing conventional cancer treatments that have been shown to extend and improve life for people like them. Sadly, these conventional treatment options are not always clearcut, but I believe progress is being made. Never fast enough of course, but progress nonetheless.

As far as whether we are overall winning the so-called “war on cancer” I’d have to agree that we probably aren’t. I tend to believe that diet is a major player in it too. The potentially good news is that the Standard American Diet is so prevalent and sets the bar so low that a majority of people can fairly easily improve their health by eating better. It’s WFPB all the way for me, but if that’s the general desired approach, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I certainly believe all is by far the best, but some is better than none.

Scott, did you see where the funding came from on the study you linked? Do you really think someone or an organization or company is going to pay for a study and have it published if the findings are contrary to the wanted results?

I am extermely wary – some people mght say unduly cynical – about alleged underground cancer ‘cures’. Many of them seem to kill more often than they cure which might eplain why people who forego conventional,cancer treatment in favour of alternative methods, seem to experience signifiantly higher mortality. Of course, we only ever hear the enthusiastic testimonials of the survivors which will give a potentially very misleading impression of the effectiveness of these therapies.

The United States SNAP program now has a Healthy Incentives Program that gives bonus funds to recipients who use their benefits to buy fresh local produce. You may be talking about broader issues than this program could begin to tackle, but I believe it is a good one. Sadly, I heard that it may be under threat of being rescinded by the current administration.

I am interested in the concept of angiogenesis versus anti-angiogenesis and health.

I say it, because I told my father about a Parkinson’s drug, which increases angiogenesis for his wife’s stroke and she is already having an improvement after a short time. She had 9 months of PT without anything to stimulate neurogenesis and they were somewhat disappointed with the results. She kept falling and lost her independence and can’t be left alone at all. She was just released from PT with them saying she won’t have much more improvement, then two weeks later, she was put on a Parkinson’s med’s, because of my research, and immediately had an improvement the first week and a half with that and at home exercises, She has a brain stent and couldn’t do things like TMS or PEMF or other things, so meds was the thing she could do and it was easier than getting her to change her diet. I think she is Keto. Either way, where there is a will, there is always another way and another way to try and in her case meds were easier than foods for angiogenesis.

I realized that I was confused. Are some foods going to make Stroke better, but Cancer worse? Or is it that fruits and vegetables help both with angio and anti-angiogenesis? I wondered that when I recommended the meds. I couldn’t get them to do almost any of the things I recommended except meds. They are medical model all the way, but, in this case, it seems to be working.

I was literally eating Almond M&M’s when I was watching this video and then switched to grapes when I heard the “zero sum game” comment about what goes in your mouth. LOL! Thanks for the guidance. I made a good choice today.

‘People who received complementary therapy for curable cancers were more likely to refuse at least one component of their conventional cancer treatment, and were more likely to die as a result, according to researchers from Yale Cancer Center and the Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy and Effectiveness Research Center (COPPER) at Yale School of Medicine. The findings were reported today online in JAMA Oncology.

“The fact that complementary medicine use is associated with higher refusal of proven cancer treatments as well as increased risk of death should give providers and patients pause,” said lead author Skyler Johnson, M.D., chief resident in radiation oncology at Yale School of Medicine. “Unfortunately, there is a great deal of confusion about the role of complementary therapies. Although they may be used to support patients experiencing symptoms from cancer treatment, it looks as though they are either being marketed or understood to be effective cancer treatments.”

Cary Gross, M.D., co-author of the study, called for further research, “The sources of misinformation need to be better understood, so that patients aren’t being sold a false bill of goods.”‘

The big concern I have here is that some posters do indeed seem to be trying to sell patients a false bill of goods. No doubt from the best of intentions but then aren’t they what are supposed to pave the way to the infernal regions?

I am told that you can counter the effects of Mercury going retrograde by dancing naked three times widdershins around a bonfire at midnight on the night of a full moon. Haven’t tried it myself though so I couldn’t say for sure.

My 11 year old daughter ha Neurofibromatosis ( spontaneous mutation). Because of this she has a brain stem glioma, glioma in hypothalamus area and a plexiform tumor in her hip/spine. All benign. In March she had a shun put in because the brain stem glioma grew enough to block the ventricle a prevent drainage. I am overwhelmed with all of the nutrtion information. We have switched to all organic Whole Foods three years ago. She is on bee propolis bio 30 cape, as well as vitamin d3, b12, b complex, vitamin c, chlorophyll, reservratrol and curcumin w/bioperene. Have you found any research that shows a plant based diet can further help those with Neurofibromatosis? There is no one out there to help us. My doctors look at me blank when I bring up nutrition. The only option they give me for treatment is chemo.
I just want some honest perspective.

In terms of studies coupling nutrition and neurofibromatosis, the first study reinforces the poor diets of adult pt’s. Nutrient intake in neurofibromatosis type 1: A cross-sectional study. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25933494) which then leads us to two interesting studies where changes were noted.

On the contrary point here is a study that does show the advantages of a WFPB approach in 11 NF1 pt’s. Synergistic Interplay between Curcumin and Polyphenol-Rich Foods in the Mediterranean Diet: Therapeutic Prospects for Neurofibromatosis (http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/9/7/783/htm)(note the changes in brain tumors) and a second study showed that diet interventions had a direct effect on muscle tissue in NF1 pt’s. Dietary intervention rescues myopathy associated with neurofibromatosis type ( in mice but and excellent proof of principle) . (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29228356)

Consider keeping up the diet and supplement interventions and stay aware of the changing issues in genetic medicine. May I also suggest having some functional dietary testing, such as the Spectracell tests to determine the correct dosing ?

Thank you so much for your reply to my message and your advice. I think having her tested will be very helpful. I believe we will move forward with a complete plant based diet and perhaps involve more of the Mediterranean foods. NF patients have a greater risk at developing cancer and it is extremely important I do whatever possible to help prevent that. Thank you for your time.
Karrie Evenson Loar

Greetings, I have so much respect for your awesome contribution to humanity and to our beloved animal friends.
I wanted to ask if there are any new large scale findings since the studies cited by Dr Greger on the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7KeRwdIH04
This was a study clear back in 2002.
It was discouraging in that it had found the same mortality rate in vegetarians and meat eaters. Dr. Greger had not only shown his integrity and commitment to the absolute truth by sharing this discouraging study with us but had also given some grately needed advice to vegans –the importance of B12 and the dangers of some processed oils.
Heeding his advice, I am therefor faithfully taking my B 12 supplement and trying to stay away from all processed oils except olive oil (which I also take in moderation) hoping that will do the trick.
However the issue of having same mortality rates in cancer in large population mortality rates is still discouraging to me. This discouraging study which Dr Greger shared with us in his integrity was at least 16 years ago so ı was wondering if there have been any new wide population studies on mortality since?– particularly as relates to cancer mortality comparisons of large populations.
With deepest respect
Lale

It’s great that you’re so interested in learning more about the research diet and mortality and I’m happy to answer your question.

There are 2 studies I would like to point you towards regarding mortality (cancer specifically). The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2) and the EPIC Oxford study.
In AHS-2, researchers compared disease and mortality statistics between Seventh Day Adventists who are omnivores, semivegetarians (flexitarians), pesco-vegetarians, lacto-ovo vegetarians, and vegans. They found that the vegans have the lowest overall rates of cancer and 15% lower risk of all cause mortality compared to the omnivore group.
The EPIC study compared 65,000 vegetarians and non-vegetarians and found that there was a small improvement in mortality risk amongst the vegetarians; however, both groups had much lower mortality rates than the national average. What is important to note is that these were not specifically vegetarians/vegans consuming whole foods diets, so it is likely that they could have had even lower rates of mortality by sticking with plants.

I have been a vegetarian for 32 years, but I smoke. I have tried quitting so many times, but my addiction is strong. I HATE that I smoke and I feel like a hypocrite, and rightly so. Are there fruits, vegetables, herbs, or spices that help with addiction or with withdrawal symptoms?

Hi I’m a health support volunteer. Nicotine is a powerful addiction. There are medications that can help with the withdrawal symptoms. You should try talking to your Dr. about some options there. By no means am I encouraging you to smoke, but there has been some studies that show cruciferous vegetables- broccoli, cauliflower, Kale etc.- decreased the DNA damage in smokers. So I don’t want you to feel that your healthy diet is wasted even if you are smoking. The standard American diet may be as bad as smoking. Continue your healthy diet. Just because you have one significant risk factor- smoking, does not mean you should add another one- unhealthy diet. But talk to your doctor about medications. I’m not aware of any studies on food and nicotine withdrawal. Good luck.

I assume the foods you mention supply Vitamin C, but I remember reading some years ago that smokers are almost always low on vitamin C. Might be a good idea to monitor that by frequent lab tests.

I was a cigarette smoker who wanted to quit and tried things like switching to chewing tobacco, little cigars, big cigars until finally one day I left the office due to having a bug of some sort and was almost out of cigarettes but too ill to stop and buy a pack.